The parent agency of Voice of America said Friday that it had issued termination notices to more than 639 more personnel, completing an 85% decrease in staff since March and effectively spelling the end of a transmission network founded to counteract Nazi propaganda.
Kari Lake, main advisor to the United States Global Media Agency, said the reduction of the staff meant that 1,400 positions had been eliminated as part of the agenda of US President Donald Trump to reduce agency personnel to a legal minimum.
“The reduction in force termination notices were sent to 639 employees in Usagm and Voice of America, part of an effort for a long time to dismantle a swollen and inexplicable bureaucracy,” Lake said in a statement.
She said the agency had been “full of dysfunction, bias and waste.”
Lake said the movement meant that Usagm was now operating near its legal minimum of 81 employees. She said that 250 employees would remain in Usagm, Voice of America and the Cuba Transmission Office, which transmits news to Cuba administered by the communists. She said that none of the 33 OCB employees had been fired.
The measure probably marks the end of VOA, which was founded in 1942 to counteract the Nazi propaganda, operated in almost 50 languages and reached 360 million people per week, many who live under authoritarian regimes.
In May, almost 600 VOA contractors were dismissed.
Some Republicans have accused VOA and other media financed with public funds to be biased against conservatives and asked to be closed as part of the broadest efforts to reduce the government.
Another USAGM station, Radio Free Asia, which has already been reduced to the skeleton staff, said in an email of the staff that was implementing additional licenses in their human resources, ordinance, security of journalists and research, training and evaluation equipment.
Several judicial cases are pending against USAGM cuts.
